Mrs Claxton waited for a moment, her bright little gaze poking Vee all over like a skewer. Vee smiled blandly. There were indeed two chickens over which the axe was currently hovering, but neither of them was going to end up on Mrs Claxton’s table. One was earmarked for the elderly gas engineer on Frogmore Lane who nursed Vee’s bathroom geyser from crisis to crisis, like a family doctor with a consumptive heiress, and the other for Noel’s birthday. He liked a bit of roast chicken, though he’d mentioned he’d found a recipe for a wild-garlic-and-celery stuffing in the newspaper and she was going to have to put her foot down about that; she had the lodgers to consider. The card that she kept permanently in the newsagent’s window mentioned ‘good, plain cooking’, as well as ‘comfortable, spacious accommodation’, and she didn’t want someone leaving because Green Shutters smelled like a French back-alley. She’d already lost Mr Purbisson in the last month, though admittedly that was because of the V-2s rather than the food – he’d gone back to his sister in Gloucester, his nerves in shreds, which meant that Noel was now short of a Geography teacher, and the next time she interviewed a lodger she’d have to find out not only if they could meet the rent, but how much they knew about alluvial plains. Or perhaps she could persuade Mr Jepson to extend his range of subjects in return for a reduction in his bill. ‘Or you could just go to a school,’ she’d suggested to Noel, trying to make it sound light-hearted yet plausible, and he’d said, ‘I’d rather clean Hitler’s WC,’ and had carried on making the sausage-meat fricassee that he always cooked on Thursdays. He’d followed it up with a steamed blackberry pudding that Miss Zawadska had announced was ‘professional qvality’, and Noel had flushed very slightly, which was the equivalent of an ordinary fourteen-year-old running round in circles punching the air.

‘I saw your nephew up on the Heath yesterday,’ said Mrs Lunn, who in between running the Methodist Soldiers’ Comforts Knitting Circle and bringing up two daughters the size of carthorses had apparently learned to read minds. ‘He was sitting on a bench with a book next to a young girl with plaits, and she was reading as well. From a different book,’ she added, quickly, as if to absolve the scene of any indelicacy.

‘She’s the grand-daughter of one of my neighbours,’ said Vee. ‘Major Lumb.’

‘Ooh, Major,’ said Mrs Arnold, who liked a title.

‘She goes to a boarding school, but they’re on half-term and her parents are in Malta. Her father’s an admiral.’

‘Ooh, Admiral.’

Vee picked up her half-completed sock again, and the other women followed her lead, Mrs Lunn working at twice the speed of the rest, her face placid, her fingers a blur, as if there was an ‘on’ switch just below her elbows. Vee herself was an indifferent knitter, unable to maintain the correct tension, so that her balaclavas had necks as wide as the head, and face-holes that encircled the features like a snare; she couldn’t imagine her efforts shortening the war by more than a second or two, and it certainly wasn’t the quality of the conversation that brought her to the circle (Mrs Rice was already resuming her account of her daughter’s wedding, an event that had taken place eight years ago). No, what kept her coming – and at least she was honest enough to admit it to herself – was the slight deference that she received from its members. In her role as Margery Overs, living in a very large house on the Heath, with distinguished neighbours, a lodger who worked at the BBC, and room for twelve chickens, she was somebody whose opinions were both sought and listened to. This was not something that had ever happened to her before. ‘Oh, Mrs Overs, we missed you,’ they said, when she’d skipped a week. ‘Mrs Overs says that Alvar Liddell always has a mug of cocoa before he reads the news,’ she’d heard Mrs Rice reporting, breathlessly.